Safe-Surf Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Safe-Surf pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, that is slightly more than simple pop-ups – their nature is purely malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your PC. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Safe-Surf pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Safe-Surf pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the web pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also promote fake shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Safe-Surf manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Safe-Surf pop-up advertisements?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up ads and Safe-Surf notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the fresh publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Safe-surf.xyz pop-ups:

Safe-Surf push notifications, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit sites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another site. Redirects are OK unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up advertisements is served as the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These theses should already raise suspicion, as websites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer is a reason to close the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Safe-Surf push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the product or a page listed on this site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to the latter was added.

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Safe-Surf popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Safe-Surf pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-ups. Safe-surf.xyz site is controlled by crooks, who deliberately show tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Safe-Surf pop-ups lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-ups promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Safe-Surf pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Safe-Surf pop-ups?

Fortunately, Safe-Surf pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, some pop-up advertisements may deliver malware to your system. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Therefore, after removing the source of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation may point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and may be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You can see the list of options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

Reset your browsers manually

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original:

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions:

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default:

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option:


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown:

When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Safe-Surf push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

How to Remove Safe-Surf Pop-ups?

Name: Safe-Surf

Description: Safe-Surf - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Safe-surf.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Safe-surf.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Safe-Surf pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

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1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.